Every year, over 20,000 children are seized by child welfare in Sweden. In a country that is regarded to have come so far in its welfare development, is this really necessary? On average, more than 15,000 children reside in foster care in Sweden, or a little more than 1% of the total underage population. Why this high number?

Ever since Karl Marx penned his ideas about the gains that could be made by centralising the means of production some one and a half centuries ago, many a mind have gone to great lengths attempting to prove him right. His ideas saw their first application during the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the 1930′s, when private ownership of farms and factories was rapidly being dismantled through forced collectivisation. The political leadership had set as its goal transforming the giant agricultural economy into a modern industrial state in the shortest possible time. The number one priority was establishing a strong factory base that would be able to sustain a strong military and catapult the Soviet Union into the superpower status that was required to conquer the planet for Communism.

Well, truth be told, Russia did experience very strong economic growth during the 1930′s, as a consequence of this state control of the economy. Though I’m not enough of a history buff myself to determine just which figures are accurate, the Soviet GDP grew at a rate of between 5% and 15% a year, although starting in the late 20′s from a level that was far behind Western economies. To achieve this goal, millions upon millions of people saw themselves becoming serfs, however, and millions more would die in state gulags or be outright executed; such was the respect shown for liberty and human rights when the state leadership had set a goal to achieve.

The Western world had long since been industrialised, hence the Soviets had at their disposal the technology required for the transformation, as well as the empiric knowledge gained through the process. Industrialisation had naturally meant great hardships for the workers, who responded by organising both strikes as well as forming political parties calling for better working and living conditions. Stalin wouldn’t let any protests of that sort interfere with his plans, but instead had a brutal police force called the Cheka established to enforce his will upon his nation. So with the blueprints from Western industrialisation, Stalin was able to make the desired transformation of his country, although with millions of people perishing in the process.

So, what does this have to do with the world we live in today? I’m sad to say that even though socialism in Marx’ meaning and the abolishment of private property is completely dead, socialism has taken on a new form. While the likes of Marx and Stalin aren’t able to outright confiscate the means of production the way they used to, they have however learned how to confiscate the fruits of reproduction – the children. In most of the Western world, there’s been a slow but gradual shift away from the role of the nuclear family in raising children, a role that’s being replaced by public day-care and public school; in Sweden, the process started as early as in the 1920′s and reached its zenith in the 70′s, when it was linked to women’s liberation and hailed as a breakthrough for equal rights.

One can’t but help to notice a parallell in these two phenomena. In the past, the Soviets and other Communist governments seized private property as they required it for their political aims; today Sweden and other countries don’t respect the rights of parents to raise their own children since it wants to subject them to its own ideals, rearing methods and values. The stated vision is a society where one has cured all social ills by removing all potential risk factors during a person’s childhood – social workers are there to monitor and supervise families so that their offspring grow up to be the sort of members of society the government desires, in a style true to the worst fears of Aldous Huxley.

To quote chapter 5 of the Swedish Social Services Act, the section on minors:

“The social council shall

- in close cooperation with the homes encourage a versatile development of personality and a favourable physical and social development of children and youth.”

When you add into the equation the fact that under Swedish law, parents are prohibited from both spanking and grounding their children, while the social workers without much in the way of legal complications can seize these same children, you realise that the state has indeed positioned itself as the primary guardian, even though this SS act is touted as being for the protection of the children. Or, to put it in simple terms: The state has socialized the children.

In Swedish day-care and schools (they’re all bound by the same curriculum, and homeschooling is pretty much illegal), children are taught quite a radical perspective on life and the world, one their parents often don’t agree with very much. For example, recently international news were made when a class of eight-graders were forced to write essays where they described their sexual fantasies, an assignment that isn’t too uncommon in today’s Sweden. See here for the story. Some two or three years ago at the high school Strömbackaskolan, male high school students were forced to write gay love letters which were later published in a book. The school law doesn’t allow you to opt out of such activities.

With the high Swedish taxes, both parents are often forced to work full-time jobs to make ends meet, which usually leaves most of the parenting in the hands of the state; roughly 90% of children spend their first couple of years in public day-care. And for the socioeconomically disadvantaged families that don’t have jobs, their children are quite often outright taken into foster care. A research study quoted in other blog posts of mine found that one in seven of what one could call “welfare mothers” had their children taken into foster care before they were seven years old. Hence it’s virtually impossible keeping the state away from your children here in Sweden, whether you’re gainfully employed or not.

Naturally, to justify this intrusion into family life, the government presents studies supposedly showing the gains that have been made in communities where the state has taken an active role in this area. Just like the gains made by the Soviet state during the 30′s, the gains here are also of one kind: they’re generally from disadvantaged American minority communities with immense social problems inherent in the families studied. It’s easy to come out ahead if you compare yourself to the born losers. The same sort of gains can’t be made in well-established families, however. Pointing to the actual data would be too major an undertaking for this article, but more and more studies are appearing which show that children become less psychologically healthy the earlier they leave their own home and enter day-care. Home-schooling, which for a long time has been on the rise in the USA and is still gaining ground, is also an area where ordinary parents have proven to be better teachers than the public school system; so much for socialism in this area.

The stagnation that the Soviet Union later experienced in its economy, falling far behind the Western world, is obviously parallelled in state child welfare as well. Just as the Soviet state failed when it tried to direct what was going to be produced and who was going to produce it, the modern welfare state also fails when it attempts to set goals for family life and take custody away from parents. The children deprived of their biological connections are the real victims. For examples of human rights abuses within Swedish child “welfare,” see the Friends of Domenic blog and the Nordic Committee for Human Rights website. Every year, more and more alarming reports come out about the state of mental health of Swedish youth, suspiciously following the centralisation of child-rearing and schooling they got the first taste of. The state is not a good parent.

Please let the children of today be spared being forced into your human kolkhozes.

The following story sets a new low watermark for the Swedish justice system. On 13 November 2008, the father of a family living in Gothenburg had picked up his four months old son from his crib when he heard something snap, after which his son burst in tears. It turned out the toddler had broken his arm, and quickly they’re off to the ER, which concludes that the boy will recover. Per government regulation, the health care staff still file a report to the social services about the damage the toddler had suffered in his own home, one they deliver the following day. The same day, the 14th of November, they also make an appointment with specialists to investigate the boy for brittle bones, but this will be over two months into the future.

The social services is much faster, however. The same day they receive the report, they launch an investigation into this home, which involves contacting the parents and accusing them of abusing their child. After the social services threatens the parents with a seizure supported by the LVU law, they agree to move into an institution for observation, which the social services has suggested. The parents are told that this place is like a spa, and that it’s nothing to be concerned about.

Yet when they arrive, they find themselves placed in something they themselves describe as an “Eastern European orphanage,” having been mislead about this institution Birkahemmet. They’re informed that the government will take the child if they try to leave. So for the next seven weeks, the whole family has to live inside an institution, even over Christmas. Wonder what songs they sang there? Maybe something like this, with music from Jingle Bells:

Filing a report
To the social services
Into the home we go
Crying all the way
Social workers say
We’re awful parents
What fun it is to have to prove
We’re not like that at all

Oh, LVU, LVU
LVU the kids
Oh, what fun it is to see
the state take my children
Oh, LVU, LVU
LVU the kids
Oh, what fun it is to see
the state take my children

This Birkahemmet is mainly for mentally retarded people whom the government doesn’t think can manage parenting. It’s an understatement to say the parents are being treated in a humiliating way here. The webpage for this home (Birkahemmet) offers a pdf document on parenting written by a psychologist by the name of Anders Broberg, who as only references lists three books authored by himself, and here is explained how many ways there are of harmful biological parenting which can constitute abuse to a child. Among other things it’s seen as pathological if a child doesn’t seek safety with his parents when faced with danger, which I can agree on. The opposite behaviour is also supposedly pathological – the “ambivalent” child that seeks safety and intimacy when not faced with danger, which I find harder to understand. Naturally the document ends by stressing the need for government intervention – placement into foster care if the biological parenthood isn’t perfect.

After the doctor had concluded the child might be suffering from brittle bones, the social services drop their investigation, and now the parents attempt to sue the government because of the violation of their integrity they’ve had to endure and that they were deceived into moving the institutions under false impressions. They ask for 300’000 crowns or about $45’000, and charge the government with kidnapping for having deprived them of their liberty. Yet when the district court delivered its verdict a week ago, the social services is cleared of these charges, though the court admits they were misled about what kind of an institution Birkahemmet was. Since the lawsuit is unsuccessful, the parents are left paying both their own legal costs (an unknown amount) as well as that of the social services (30’750 crowns plus interest).

It might be nothing more than my suspicious nature, but I definitely see the district court sending the little guy a message here, by leaving the parents with all the legal costs: “Don’t even think you can sue the government!”

As I mentioned earlier today, I was going to write a translated version of the censored article during the next couple of days. Well, I guess I’ve been pretty productive today, finishing both the original article and an English translation. The following text was rejected by supposedly free and open news commentary site newsmill.se.

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What are the actual aims of the social care?

Our authorities have under Swedish law a very far-reaching responsibility for the upbringing of children. The legal framework and the authority they’ve got to work with is detailed in the Social Services law (SoL) and the Care of Young Persons Special Provisions Act (LVU), laws that grant the social welfare council the power to take children and youth into state custody when it’s felt that the biological parents are mismanaging their task, or when the behaviour of the youngsters is considered to make care essential. Just what is it one wants to achieve through this?

The other day when I contemplated Swedish child welfare policies – the goals enumerated in chapter 5 of SoL, and how the seizure was justified in one of the LVU verdicts in an internationally renowned Swedish errand (the Domenic case), it struck me just how vaguely defined the goals for the development of children have been established. For anyone unfamiliar with the legislation, this is the chapter of the SoL where the intended goals of a child’s upbringing are accounted for. Paragraph one reads as follows – words that on the surface may appear fairly harmless, but which in their application are a very powerful tool in the hands of the state for subjecting families to its will:

“The social welfare council shall
- work for children and youth to grow up under safe and good terms,
- in close cooperation with the homes encourage a versatile development of personality and a favourable physical and social development of children and youth,
- with special attention follow the development of children and youth that have displayed signs of an unfavourable development,”

For the legislation in its entirety, see Socialtjänstlagen. The subsequent lines detail the role of the social welfare council and make it clear that it only requires the potential of the child or youth to develop unfavourably to give the authorities the task of intervening. In this court case, one hasn’t been able to establish any harm that has come to the one taken into custody (Dominic), but ont supports the need for care through the boy’s development being in jeopardy and that he’s felt to have fallen behind in some areas of development – apart from emotional and social maturity, motor skills as well! I guess I must consider myself lucky that the social welfare council never was told that I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was nine years old when I was a child – who knows, maybe I would have been seized too otherwise?

Something that strikes you in the verdict of the administrative appeals court that I’m reading is how the social welfare council can cherry-pick things here and there to support the alleged need for care. Nothing is accounted for about what danger this delayed development is believed to mean to the child, neither how one is meant to correct it other than the standard line “he’s believed to be in need of (daily) routines, stability and being approached in a predictable manner.” I would suggest that these very things are shattered when one makes the kind of immediate seizure that seven-year-old Domenic was put through at Arlanda airport last year. But, enough about a specific case. Things you ask yourself when studying this errand and the legislation are these:

Exactly what developmental deficiencies does the social welfare council have the right to be concerned about, and what can the absence of an intervention mean to the child?

Just what developmental goals have to b reached by the child to avoid him or her being taken into state custody, and what’s the justification for these goals to exist?

Can the government do a better job of reaching these goals than the biological parents? Does any solution even exist to the stated developmental problem?

A child that becomes the subject of such an intervention may already have formed a certain image of how his or her life will turn out, based on the child’s own conditions and aptitude. If you don’t perform well at school P.E., you won’t be an elite athlete, and if you suffer from learning disabilities you won’t be a Nobel laureate. Yet the social council still provides the child with unreasonable expectations of how its future will turn out, to make the child more cooperative. One lures in the children through material gifts within the care system and attempts to convince the child that his or her parents are a mere burden. “With the social services, your life will be like in heaven; with your parents, like in hell.”

In SOSFS 1997:15 (a document on the application of the LVU law) one describes how unrealistic promises on the part of the parents can constitute abuse and therefore be grounds on which to seize a child. Why doesn’t the same apply to the government? With what right do they rearrange the child’s outlook on life in this way? Instead one ought to let people find their place in life themselves. I’m bothered by how people that are appreciated by their surroundings and are fully functional in daily life as well as have a clear potential on a free job market are still written off as disabled in Sweden. A child that would appear normal to other people, in some ways even far ahead in some areas of its development, is considered to have “special needs” when facing the social services.

Something else one asks oneself is how in such a normless society as today’s Sweden, one can still determine what’s a favourable development and what isn’t. Especially when it comes to sex and coexistence, Sweden has rebelled against traditions of all the world and declared that all sexuality is normal as long as it’s with the consent of the other partner. There you never hear about any norms having to exist to protect the health and development of individual, or that society’s needs have to be taken into account. Yet still one barges into families and labels normal behaviour as disordered; that the afore-mentioned Domenic is, or at least was until the social council entered the picture, the kind of child that goes around and hugs everyone, was considered to be signs of a disordered development. If one is to apply norms on which one judges behaviour and development, clearly they should be founded on something more objective than the arbitrary whims of the social services?

I want to see them come clean and explain how you’re supposed to be like as a human being to be considered to have developed normally, and justify these expectations with society’s needs. With the risk of not appearing politically correct, I don’t see how you can include sexuality with your own gender into this, since that would mean an end to child-bearing.

When it comes to this section from SoL chapter 5, it’s quite similar to paragraph 2 of the Law on the Hitler Youth. The difference is that while the Third Reich required children to grow up to be soldiers, and physical, intellectual and moral goals were defined, the Swedish law instead describes “a versatile development of personality and a favourable physical and social development”; in common for both of them is that the government establishes a goal for what should become of the growing generation. In today’s Sweden, one is however not entirely honest concerning this, but prefers to use phrases such as “the best interest of the child” to describe the development that makes the individual a cog in the intended social machinery.

But if one puts aside one’s suspicions on just why the state feels it has a right to set goals for a child’s development: Afore-mentioned SOSFS 1997:15, spanning some 120 pages, enumerates a great many situations where forced care under the LVU law can come in question. If the potential of the parents raising their children the wrong way, why then not make the information the social services has amassed on bad parenting easily available to Sweden’s parents, so that they themselves can learn from other people’s mistakes? Though naturally that won’t mean any tax money for foster care – the representatives of the social welfare state can no longer make a living from taking other people’s children. If your main income is from placing children in state care, you naturally have no incentive to get the parents themselves to raise their children the right way. Such an environment rather encourages you to sabotage parenthood, and if the social council spots weaknesses in a family, they will naturally seize the opportunity. For some parents in vulnerable situations, this can mean such stress that it eventually topples the parenthood over.

Earlier this year I learned of a clearly questionable LVU case on the NCHR forum; a baby of some five months of age had been immediately seized when the social council felt it had observed that this child was delayed in her development, since she didn’t make proper eye contact. At first it was deemed to have been caused by neglect in care, and the ability of the parents to manage the custody was ruled out – the child must instead be taken care of by society. After a while one realized that there had never been any neglect in the care, but now they had made up a new reason to keep the child – she had now been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and therefore had “special needs” due to genetic factors instead of environmental ones. This didn’t make much difference to the parents, however – because of these “special needs,” she was now considered beyond the ability of these two to take care of, even if they were not deemed unfit to raise a normal child! So now she’s still in state custody, but with significantly more highly paid government employees involved in the care. It’s fascinating how the grounds for taking someone into care can change during the course of the errand.

This naturally poses another question, the one on which party can manage the parent role the best in these unusual cases. Although the social services has tons of regulation on when it’s meant to take a child into care, there are no clear solutions to the posed problems. It’s simply implicitly assumed that everything can be dealt with in state care. Just like in the old Soviet union, one believes one can solve everything through central planning. If the natural biological parenthood is the market economy, then foster care becomes the planned economy. Do we have any historical reasons to feel that central planning can remedy the potential problems of the market economy? Both when it comes to the individual participants in a market economy, as well as the parents in a biological family, these local entities understand their surroundings better. The government can never have the same correct and thorough information on what’s required to solve the problems facing the local participants. When central planning doesn’t achieve economic wealth, why would it then work in family matters? Can the social services ever have the same insight into a child’s needs and greater love for it, than the actual parents?

Speaking of the Soviet Union, there is something else in Sweden that reminds you of this since two decades back deceased state. Even in the Soviet Union, they had their own court system with a unique legal tradition that drastically set itself apart from the Western one. Most notorious of them all within this tradition was Stalin’s chief attorney Vyshinsky, who coined the phrase “confession of the accused is the queen of evidence.” The accused were given lawyers of their own here as well, but they didn’t do much to free their clients from guilty. They usually instead followed the attorney’s line and only defended their client on a superficial level. When these were charged with groundless allegations of terrorist attacks, the lawyer was content with merely presenting his client in a more sympathetic way, but never challenging the charges.

We have the same phenomenon today in Swedish administrative courts, where in LVU matters you have three parties: the social welfare council, the biological parents and the child, who all have legal counsel of their own. The social council is naturally the party that will call for care, and in practice the same is always true of the child’s alleged counself as well. Generally the parent’s counsel doesn’t put up much of a fight either, but instead try to convince these parents to accept the care. Only if the parents on their own can get the court to approve of their legal counsel can they expect anyone to actually call for care measures to be rejected. It’s true that the representatives of the social council and the child don’t pursue the same line, but it’s rare that they differ in the matter at stake – the child is going into foster care. In the Domenic case, the social council depicted the parents Christer and Annie as people worthy of revile and called for care, while the representative of the child on the other hand claimed that certainly these two people wanted to be good parents, but simply didn’t have the ability to be any, hence foster care was necessary.

Can one really read out any real goal for this extensive child welfare administration, or is the simple answer that it’s not about anything else than corruption?

Today I set to work on something I had planned to do the last couple of days – write an article for an online newspaper in Sweden called Newsmill (www.newsmill.se). The topic of the article was the Swedish social services, and my curiosity as to their real aims. The government here has far-reaching goals concerning the development of children, stating as its intentions to make sure everyone gets to enjoy a good childhood. The actual application of state force very much puts these goals in jeopardy, however, which is why I authored this article.

After spending some two hours putting down about 2’500 words, I was delighted to be finished with the article, a bit proud of my work and sudden burst of creativity, and then I entered the article into their system, uploaded a picture of myself etc, to make it all look very good and proper. At this time I didn’t expect anything else than that my article would be available for reading on this site, especially since they take pride in describing themselves as guardians of free speech, and how important freelance contributions are in this area.

Then some 20 minutes after having sent in the article for review, I get this message back.

“Hello. Thanks for a well-written article, but since we’re not keen on publishing writing that can be interpreted as indirect allegations, we decline the text. We’ve had a couple of similar texts earlier and decided to go for a more cautious approach. Yours truly, Newsmill”

It was refused with no more than this for an explanation. I might be hot-headed at times, but I had taken great care into not coming across as too hostile in the article. My first reaction was one of shock, naturally – the joy I felt of having finished the article was suddenly gone, replaced by a bit of anguish. Is this what I can expect when I speak out against the government, simply being censored just like that? Then I start pondering just what in the article could have made them want to refuse it. Was it that I criticized the social services for caring more about profits than the well-being of children? Or that I pointed out that the administrative courts that try the errands rarely vote anything else than in the government’s favour? I’m personally mostly inclined to believe it was because I mentioned the Domenic case, which I’ve written about here. The media blackout concerning this case is complete, and I guess you don’t get published even on “free” online newspapers if you simply bring it up in passing.

A bit sad that the intended forum for my article was denied me. But I’ve decided to translate the article into English as well, so people of the world can see just what gets you censored in this totalitarian little country. This article should appear here within the next few days.

Here I will present a number of interesting quotes and statistics from the evaluation of the Swedish social services. Since this is a topic that could potentially stretch a whole lot longer length than an ordinary blog post, I will limit myself to a single man whose research, even though he’s apparently an ardent believer in the social welfare state, nevertheless has highlighted its many shortcomings. If this data is of interest, there may be follow-ups later on.

The background: In Sweden, a mammoth institution called the social services manages welfare payouts, child welfare, social care for troubled youth and juvenile delinquents, addiction treatment, and a host of other things. Bo Vinnerljung is a professor in social work, working at the National Board of Health and Welfare, who’s studied something that’s been quite neglected within the social services: the long-term outcome for people placed into care, with his doctor’s thesis entitled “Foster Children as Adults.” Though working for the government and endorsing the system, he’s still somewhat critical when it comes to certain philosophies, such as the ever-present belief in the inescapability of social inheritance; while the government feels it can rule out the possibility that individuals from dysfunctional homes can still make a future for themselves, Vinnerljung doesn’t.

From “Into adulthood” 2007:

The Swedish social services is well-known for monitor children very closely; the following is about investigations concerning the behaviour of adolescents:

“Studies in this field have found that around 6% of all teenagers in the country – approximately two in every school class – are reported to the Social Services annually”

I wonder how trivial information that’s being circulated here. This and this student talked back to the teacher?

“Young people who had entered care during adolescence had the worst outcomes of all subgroups. They had over four-fold higher risks of entering adulthood with only a basic education. Between 15% and 20% of all girls became teenage mothers – compared with less than 3% among majority population peers. However, both studies were unable to discriminate between teenagers placed for behavioural problems and for other reasons.”

So the group that to a large extent included teenagers who were not criminally active still faced a negative outcome. Though one can’t rule out that reasons for which the children were taken into care had an impact, wasn’t the care supposed to remedy that?

“Sweden has a long tradition of national registers with high-quality data for health and socio-economic indicators. These registers are based on the individually unique 10-digit personal number that follows every Swedish resident from birth (or date of immigration) to death.”

I just love the government keeping such a journal over me. I remember a couple of years ago when Karolinska Institutet wanted me to participate in a study on the heritability of a certain intestinal disorder that I’m not sure how to translate into English, because I had suffered from that as an infant. What’s really funny is that I didn’t even know the name of it, the only memory I had of it was the surgical tissue that’s still visible. The government still kept a record of me having had this surgery some 25 years earlier though.

On page 8 of this article, the two authors have compiled an “outcomes ladder,” based on what proportion of the population had met certain negative criteria such as being in prison and similar. Only 8.2% of boys placed for behavioural problems were doing well at age 25, and 27.5% of the ones placed for other reasons, compared to an estimated 70% of boys and 80% of girls that didn’t enter care. For the ones sentenced to secure youth care, the outcome was as bad as it could get:

“The results for young people placed in secure units were dismal. At age 25, 70% had been in prison or were dead. Not a single one (0%) was ‘doing well’, if all negative indications in the outcome ladder were included.”

That’s indeed great proof that the 4-5’000 crowns per person and day (about ten times as much as an inmate costs at a US prison) spent on secure youth care doesn’t accomplish anything whatsoever. You truly know your policies are a failure when you don’t have a single success story to show for it.

These figures are very alarming when you consider the fact that the Swedish state is so very keen on taking children and youth into care when it’s simply not warranted. A couple of quotes from “Child Welfare in Sweden – an overview” by Sven Hessle and Bo Vinnerljung:

“Swedish child welfare legislation makes no strict distinction between child protection and youth justice. Asocial behaviour of young people under 20 is a child welfare problem, outside the realms of criminal justice. Neither are there organisational dividing lines between different means of intervention. Local authorities shall mainly work with social support to and in partnership with families, regardless of the age of the children or the reason for intervention.”

In this country, troubled teenagers are sometimes placed at the same institutions as murderers and rapists.

“Time series data reveals that the use of foster care has decreased continually the last 13 years, from 72% of all initiated placements in 1983 to 55% 1995, while placements in different forms of residential care have increased (from 28% to 45%). This trend, valid for all age groups, cannot be explained by changes in the care population. Age and gender patterns have been remarkably stable throughout this period. The development of the care system has taken a path in the opposite direction of eg in Britain, contrary to the intentions of national policy makers and cost wise from cheap to expensive care”

“Even though follow-up studies usually is depressing literature (ibid.), placements have increased since since 1994.”

“The proportion of compulsory/voluntary care can vary a lot between countries. In a comparison, the figure for compulsory care in Sweden is 20 times that of Japan (Hessle, et al, 1996)”

Finally he lists the reasons for taking teenagers into care. Out of the ones taken for “behavioural problems,” only 1 in 3 had committed a crime, and only 1 in 6 a violent crime. The majority were only guilty of vaguely defined school-related problems.

In Sweden, the government truly cares about you.. well, at least it’s happy to put you into care.

For a more thorough study of Swedish society, see my book “The Madhouse” up at Amazon

Last Friday, on the 26th, a married couple with three children was sentenced to nine months in prison for gross violation of integrity, a crime that has a maximum sentence of six years, for having spanked their children as part of their upbringing them. The district prosecutor had called for a year in prison each and is considering appealing the verdict. For the story in English, see this link.

No evidence of the children having suffered any physical or psychological harm was presented, and the court states that “Nothing else has become evident than that the parents – apart from the actions addressed in the case – have had a loving and caring relationship to their children.” The parents had intentionally used spanking as a way of raising their children, as the third option after having discussed transgressions with their children.

As soon as the criminal investigations were initiated, the social services took all four children into state custody and placed them into care, and they will likely remain there for the foreseeable future. In Sweden, both spanking and grounding your children is illegal – even the so called “timeouts” that are routinely used for correcting children, and generally all parents found guilty of such conduct lose custody over their children. This criminalization might have you thinking that the government is terribly concerned about the well-being of the children. Well, while the government constrains the rights of parents to discipline their children, it takes great liberties itself. The Swedish LVU law allows the government to deprive a child of his or her liberty if the child engages in “socially destructive behaviour,” which can really be anything, and they can then be taken from their parents by police in uniform and put into care at an institution. There they routinely face humiliating treatment and have their self esteems shattered.

What follows here is a video clip of a child being taken by police officers in uniform when she tried to run away from institution care back to her dad, a placement she had been put in in spite of not committing a crime. Friends have described the girl here as quite happy before her institution placement, but afterwards she’s assumed a very dark outlook on life. Immediately preceding her running away, the social services had decided to reduce the limited time she was allowed to see her dad even more, and she simply broke down and couldn’t take it any more. The clip shows both when she arrives at home completely shook up after running away, and the police the morning after coming to move her back to the institution.

Administrative use of force of this sort is quite common in today’s Sweden, though mass media refuses to cover it even if the victims themselves approach newspapers; in this case, Youtube was the only outlet the father had of making what had happened known to the public, though his initial upload is gone now, and this is by another person.

In most of the world, at least the industrialized parts of it, Jim Crow laws and Apartheid are things of the past. Though people may at some point have faced segregation and discrimination during historic times, this is not true in today’s world. Sweden differs tremendously in this regard, in that people without medical examination or very much evidence pointing to any actual disability are given stigmatizing psychiatric labels that set them apart from the rest of society. Even if psychiatry is highly active in all of the western world in diagnosing children with disorders, no other country to this writer’s knowledge changes the legal status of these individuals based on the labels they receive.

If this sounds hard to believe, let me refer the reader to one of the forms that you have to send in in order to apply for a driving license in Sweden. On the form “health declaration,” a number of potential risk factors are listed, such as a history of alcoholism, epilepsy, narcolepsy and so on.. as well as “ADHD, DAMP, Asperger’s syndrome” and similar labels. You’re legally required to check this box if you at some point in your life have been diagnosed with any of these labels, and if so, you have to provide an up-to-date doctor’s statement on how serious your condition is, to be cleared for a license.

So if physicians or perhaps even teachers or social workers at some time in your life have given you any of these labels, you now have to get the approval of a specialist doctor to be able to drive a car legally. One would think that completing the driving examination would be enough. Getting such an appointment is a real hassle in that the time waiting in line can easily reach a whole year, and if the government has taken a disliking to you as a person, it’s not unheard of that this doctor is called on as the one to deny you a license; government employees tend to run each other’s errands.

This is of course not the only type of discrimination a diagnosed person faces. For the rest of this article, I will refer to this group of people as The Oppressed Minority (TOM).

Members of TOM are when discovered in a school setting routinely separated from mainstream society into special education, even if their own academic proficiency would rather make gifted education a better choice. In Sweden there is no such thing, however, for ideological reasons – no one is allowed to get ahead.

Members of TOM also face oppression at the hands of the social services, as the Swedish government carefully monitors the growing generation for any signs of them developing in an unexpected way. This goes far beyond actual juvenile delinquency – such things as social isolation are also considered valid reasons for intervention by the government. Though not very extensively covered by mass media, this has resulted in a significant number of children being sent off to institution care in spite of not committing a crime or causing any trouble. Such an event occurred as late as October of this year, when a roughly ten year old boy, living with his father, was dragged off to an institution (called an HVB home) by four police officers and two social workers, when he hadn’t showed up for school that Wednesday morning.

No advance warning was given for this intervention, and when they arrived at 9 in the morning, the boy was still in his bed. The very same day the boy is put in the institution, he attempts to escape, jumping out through the window onto the ground some six meters below and fractures his foot. A number of families that have suffered the same sort of home invasions the last couple of years under similar circumstances have filed complaints against the government with varying degrees of success. Though the first administrative court approved of this boy’s residential placement, the appeals court revoked the care decision and let him return to his dad.

It’s pretty ironic that Sweden in its penal code states that no one under the age of 15 can suffer any legal sanction for crimes committed, yet this didn’t stop the social services from deciding that 10 year old boy was “in need of care” and deprived of his liberty.

As adults, members of TOM suffer discrimination at the employment office in that the government doesn’t expect them to be able to manage real jobs, and they’re whisked off to supported employment under humiliating conditions. If they dare to have children, the social services is all over them, monitoring the development of their offspring and often taking these into foster care; sometimes they plan these decisions before the young ones are even born. Though a decision on LVU (the child seizure law) can’t be made before a child is born, this doesn’t stop the social services from coordinating interventions with the health care system “if it’s necessary for a required intervention in protection of the expected child,” to quote SOSFS 1997:15.

Members of TOM are sometimes assigned “interpreters” during meetings with other government employees, as they’re not expected to understand their own native language, but are treated as adult children. When dealing with the justice system, members of TOM are said to be “rättshaverister,” a Swedish word denigrating people who just don’t give up legal fights, insinuating that they don’t understand when they’re in the wrong. A small number of psychiatrists such as Christopher Gillberg, Susanne Bejerot and Björn Kadesjö have on their own as non-elected academic researchers been able to establish what has to be considered modern Jim Crow laws in today’s Sweden.

Though I would say that my childhood was pretty normal and none of my behaviour ever caused any concern, the government did however intervene in my life as I was entering adulthood, as my mother’s home had become a bum nest. Then they wanted to provide me with all sorts of care – it would appear as if someone at the social services had written in my journal that I was terribly disabled and couldn’t look after myself. I strongly believe that these psychiatrists are to blame, and that without them, I would simply have been left alone the way I wanted.

It’s unbelievable that today in a Western “democracy,” people are still given special (for the worse) treatment based on genetic characteristics.

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For a video clip I made with quotes from some of these psychiatrists and their condescending attitudes, see this link. (the part on what I’ve here called TOM starts at 1:15)

The new Swedish parliamentary session brings more insanity than ever before.. During the first month, Swedish members of parliament have filed no less than 17 bills addressing gay rights, bringing the total filed the last eight years to 96 – at least that’s the number with the term “LGBT” in the title.

To quote an excerpt from a bill concerning SIDA, the Swedish government agency for foreign aid:

“Unfortunately only a fraction of SIDA’s budget today goes to LGBT work. Equally regrettable is that the cutback in the number of recipient countries for Swedish aid that has taken place probably hasn’t taken into account the work with the LGBT issue.”

“The foreign aid work can’t focus only on the worst catastrophies in the world.”

“Sweden should reconsider the grounds for its foreign aid work and then bring up the matter of the situation of sexual minorities.”

On the other hand, the LVU abuses aren’t being addressed at all – Swedish politicians do nothing to prevent children from being taken from poor families and put into orphanages for profits. In a recent bill mentioning the LVU law, a certain party leader even describes the law as “working fine.”

In the madhouse that is today’s Sweden, few things matter more in public life than that you’ve got “LGBT proficiency,” that you “understand” that nothing is of more importance than the supposed plight of LGBT people.

This is a video clip I made last year, mocking the LGBT madness in Swedish politics: Youtube link

This dreaded convention is the next big thing in the realm of global governance, being used to replace the biological parents with the state as the primary caretaker of children. Here I will highlight certain articles in this convention that are of particular concern.

“Article 7

1. The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”

And why should the child be registered with the state? The wording assumes a child that is not registered with the state is being deprived of rights, as if parents that refuse to register their child are violating this person’s rights. What it really means is making sure the child gets to enjoy the governance of the state, that the child is born into a certain state’s custody.

“Article 11

1. States Parties shall take measures to combat the illicit transfer and non-return of children abroad.

2. To this end, States Parties shall promote the conclusion of bilateral or multilateral agreements or accession to existing agreements.”

“the illicit transfer and non-return of children abroad?” Who gave the UN the right to consider the decision of the parents to move their child “illicit?” When looking at the way the Swedish state has seized children of families attempting to leave the country, for example in the Domenic Johansson case, one gets a glimpse of a future in which the UN has made it impossible to leave one’s country of residence without permission. If a family escapes their country, they will be sent back in accordance with paragraph 2 above.

Some other articles of note is 12, which is quite radical in that it gives the child a say against his or her parents in custody issues, something that can be provided by a representative of the government. I suppose “the best interests of the child” is newspeak for “the best interests of the state.”

Article 13 constrains the right of a parent to protect his or her child from undesired exposure to information that can be harmful in the opinion of the parent, though article 17 instead enables the government to do the same thing.

Article 20, paragraph 3, lists institution placement as a possible replacement for one’s biological family, which should be considered unacceptable. Do we need more orphanages like in Romania and Sweden?

Article 29 dictates the values the child should be reared with. 29b states that children shall be raised with the principles in the UN charter. This convention is apparently not only about protecting children, but also about replacing parents as the ones responsible for endowing the child with a value system.

Though my country of Sweden has taken a leading role in promoting the global enactment of this convention, its own fulfillment of the articles leaves a lot to be desired. These are the articles that Sweden in my opinion is in violation of:

Article 2.2 “…ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child’s parents”

Though mass media won’t cover it, it’s well-known that Sweden specifically targets religious families for foster care placements, and many Muslim families today see their children taken by the state, with the government officials citing an unspecified “risk to the health or development” of the child if he or she remains with the parents. Certain non-violent political activism on the part of teenagers also tends to have them punished through being deprived of liberty, under §3 of the dreaded LVU law.

Article 19 – Sweden fails in living up to the article’s goal of protecting the child from violence and exploitation, when children are being put into orphanages solely for profit. These institutions receive about 4’000 crowns per child and day, about $600, and letting this financial incentive influence whether a child is taken into custody is a clear case of exploitation. Furthermore, the neglect in these institutions is horrendous, and more peaceful children often find themselves placed with juvenile delinquents, being severely beaten on an almost daily basis.

Article 23:

“1. States Parties recognize that a mentally or physically disabled child should enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions which ensure dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child’s active participation in the community.”

Sweden routinely places children with fictitious mental disabilities into special education, which ruins their options of ever becoming self-reliant or to become a part of the community. Who wants a friend that’s in special ed?

Article 29:

“1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

(a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;”

For ideological reasons, Sweden doesn’t offer bright pupils any gifted education, hence these children won’t be able to reach their full potential. One could have understanding for financial reasons being the limiting factor, but ideological reasons are a direct violation of this article.

Article 37:

“(b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time;”

Sweden locks up children in orphanages year in and year out, in clear violation of this article. The legal obstacles to the government placing a child in an institution setting are non-existent, and often a mere diagnostic label such as ADHD or “autism spectrum disorder” is enough to have the deprivation of their liberty approved of in an administrative court.

For a more thorough understanding of Swedish society, see my book “The Madhouse” up at Amazon, or read the limited preview on Google Books – search for Daniel Hammarberg. If the afore-mentioned Domenic case is of concern, see the Friends of Domenic Johansson blog.